Aidan Gomez Explained

Aidan Gomez
Birth Place:Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Education:University of Toronto
University of Oxford
Occupation:CEO, Cohere

Aidan Gomez is a British-Canadian[1] computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, with a focus on natural language processing.[2] He is the co-founder and CEO of the technology company Cohere.[3] [4]

Early life and education

Gomez grew up in Brighton, Ontario.[5] He graduated from the University of Toronto with a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics.[6] He was pursuing a PhD in computer science from the University of Oxford.[7] He paused his studies to launch Cohere; however, he ultimately was granted the PhD in 2024.[8]

Career

In 2017, as a 20 year-old intern at Google Brain, Gomez was one of eight authors of the research paper "Attention Is All You Need",[9] which is credited with changing the AI industry and helping lead to the creation of ChatGPT.[3] [4] [10] [11] The paper proposed a novel deep learning architecture called the transformer, that enables machine learning models to analyze large amounts of data for patterns, and then use those patterns to make predictions. It has been commonly adopted for training large language models and in the development of generative AI.[3] In 2017, Gomez founded FOR.ai,[7] a program to help researchers learn machine learning techniques in a collaborative format, which later became Cohere For AI.[12]

As a PhD student, Gomez worked as a machine learning researcher at Google Brain.[7] At that time, he co-authored the paper "One Model to Learn Them All" about multi-task learning by a single neural network.[6]

In 2019, Gomez left Google Brain to launch Cohere, an enterprise-focused company that helps businesses implement AI into chatbots, search engines, and other products.[3] [4] [13] He is CEO of the company, which has been valued at over $2 billion.[4]

Gomez was named to the 2023 Time 100/AI list of the most influential people in the field of artificial intelligence.[3] He and his fellow Cohere founders Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst were named number 1 on 2023 Maclean's AI Trailblazers Power List.[14]

Notes and References

  1. News: Kokalitcheva . Kia . What they're saying: Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez . 3 November 2023 . Axios . 2 July 2023.
  2. News: Watson . H.G. . Toronto Start-up Cohere Is Teaching Machines to Speak Our Language . 3 November 2023 . Canadian Business . 19 July 2022.
  3. Chow . Andrew . Time100 AI . 3 November 2023 . Time . 7 September 2023.
  4. News: Metz . Cade . Generative A.I. Start-Up Cohere Valued at About $2 Billion in Funding Round . 3 November 2023 . New York Times . 2 May 2023.
  5. News: Castaldo . Joe . Lost in translation . 8 November 2023 . Globe and Mail . 26 October 2022.
  6. News: Haikara . Nina . Making an impact: U of T undergrad co-authors important machine learning study at Google . 8 November 2023 . U of T News . 21 June 2017.
  7. News: Harris . Jeremie . Oxford's Aidan Gomez on working at Google and the quest for general intelligence . 8 November 2023 . Towards Data Science . 12 June 2019.
  8. https://twitter.com/aidangomez/status/1789569124688896022
  9. Vaswani . Ashish . Ashish Vaswani . Shazeer . Noam . Parmar . Niki . Uszkoreit . Jakob . Jones . Llion . Gomez . Aidan N . Aidan Gomez . Kaiser . Ɓukasz . Polosukhin . Illia . Attention is All you Need . Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems . 2017 . 30 . Curran Associates, Inc..
  10. News: Hammond . George . Aidan Gomez: AI threat to human existence is 'absurd' distraction from real risks . 6 November 2023 . Financial Times . 15 June 2023.
  11. News: Olson . Parmy . Meet the $4 Billion AI Superstars That Google Lost . 6 November 2023 . Bloomberg . 12 July 2023.
  12. News: Goldman . Sharon . Google Brain alum to helm new nonprofit AI research lab . 14 November 2023 . VentureBeat . 14 June 2022.
  13. News: Aidan Gomez on Building an AI Business . 6 November 2023 . Radical Ventures.
  14. News: Watson . H.G. . The Power List: Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez & Nick Frosst are creating a smarter, friendlier chatbot . 6 November 2023 . Maclean's . 16 March 2023.